Travis Bickle's Dantean journey through a rotten Big Apple is perhaps Scorsese's first film (of many) to draw on a thousand cultural influences and still come up with something staggeringly original. Channeling everything from Dostoyevsky to Hitchcock, Taxi Driver is a unique, hallucinatory tale of shattering loneliness and misguided vengeance; the story of a man gliding disgustedly through a world so sick and ungodly that you'd think it was 2017 or something. From Bernard Herrmann's schizophrenic opening theme to that final, possibly figmental fare, Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader command a restless, nagging din of inscrutable characters and mysterious stylings to accompany Bickle's descent from amusing social awkwardness to ferocious, guns-blazing psychopathy. And while he's always been a collaborative filmmaker, the unholy trinity of Scorsese, Schrader and Robert De Niro hungrily feed off each other here; the product of their union an unsettling neon nightmare.

Neil is using Letterboxd to share film reviews and lists with friends. Join here.